You know all those horror stories about a cigar-chomping producer who screens a movie and says they need to lose 15 minutes and shoot a new ending? Wedding Crashers needed a producer like that.

Supermensch sells the impression that its subject is a genuinely good guy.

It’s easy to see how an unhappy transition to suburban mommyhood might be enough to unhinge any self-respecting former punk rocker but, even so, it’s a little hard to take the angst-ridden mid-life shenanigans in Kelly & Cal seriously.

The Serpent and the Rainbow is uncanny in the way it takes the most lurid images and makes them plausible.

Motel Hell is a welcome change-of-pace; it's to "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" as "Airplane!" is to "Airport." It has some great moments.

Kennedy goes for silhouettes and, as I’ve mentioned, for the kind of carefully casual arrangements of figures we find in samurai films - the Japanese Western. The result is a movie that isolates the John Wayne mystique and surrounds it with the necessary simplicity and directness.

Essentially an extended infomercial but works as a breezy, slightly goofy, occasional touching and infectiously upbeat slice of entertainment

Writer-director Dan Krauss takes a creative risk by combining traditional non-fiction storytelling techniques with re-creations that go far beyond the usual shadowy-silhouette snippets.

Much of the plot feels like we’re retracing the footprints of the original, especially in the early going, and there are a few moments when the CGI looks like one of those slick but cheap AI demonstration videos you see posted on social media, but “Gladiator II” is a welcome slice of R-rated, popcorn movie fun in the middle of the generally super-serious awards season.

Something New delivers all the usual pleasures of a love story, and something more. The movie respects its subject and characters, and is more complex about race than we could possibly expect.

Most impressive of all is Odenkirk, who looks and sounds nothing like an action star until it’s time for Hutch to become an action star, and we totally believe this physically unimpressive, normally mild-mannered guy as a simmering cauldron of rage who could take that teapot over there and kill ya with it.

The high-tech stuff is absorbing. Harrison Ford once again demonstrates what a solid, convincing actor he is, and there's good supporting work from Archer, Thora Birch as the Ryans' precocious daughter, and the irreplaceable James Fox as a British cabinet minister. But at the end, when a character is leaping into a burning speedboat in choppy seas, I wondered if this was exactly what Tom Clancy had in mind.

This is a Western that places the sidekick front and center, and in doing so gives reliable everyman supporting character actor Bill Pullman a rare chance to carry the film, and what a fine job he does with the added responsibilities.

In his dynamic and revealing documentary Finding Fela!, director Alex Gibney captures the many sides of Afrobeat king Fela Kuti, a complex character who is at once inspiring and vexing.

The whole enterprise seems to be Isaacson's project. He narrates the film. Kristin, his wife, seems fully in accord with him, and they're both courageous, but I would have liked more insights from the side of her that teaches psychology.

Unusual framing device aside, Halston is on balance a solid and affectionate tribute to an American original.

Unlike the typical, effects-laden, comet-threatens-the-planet B-movie, Greenland is more in the vein of Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds,” with the scenes of chaos and destruction serving as the backdrop for the story of one family’s desperate quest for survival — even when circumstances have ripped them apart.

This is the kind of film that will send some viewers to the exits by the halfway point, while others surely will hail the bold genius of Lanthimos’ absurdist flourishes.

This is a true story, and it’s now getting the feature film treatment in Bill Pohlad’s warm and elegiac and lovely Dreamin’ Wild, with Casey Affleck doing his disheveled-restless-socially awkward thing in a searingly strong performance as the brilliantly talented Donnie, and the versatile Walton Goggins making the most of an opportunity to play a genuinely nice regular guy in Joe, who always knew he was at best the Ringo to Donnie’s John.

Sentimental without being corny, a tearjerker with dignity. The Great Santini is a movie to seek out and to treasure.

You need to see this one on the biggest screen possible, and let it wash over you as if you had stepped inside the most incredible video game experience ever created — one in which events in the manufactured universe can have lasting and serious real-world consequences.

The movie is not so much about romance as about goodheartedness, which is a rarer quality, and not so selfish. And Cage has a certain gentleness that brings out nice soft smiles on Fonda's face.

There is a certain lackluster feeling to the way the key characters debate the issues, and perhaps that reflects the suspicion of the filmmakers that they have hitched their wagon to the wrong cause.

An extraordinary thriller... The film centers on two remarkable performances, by Gwyneth Paltrow and Hope Davis.

What is most valuable about Amistad is the way it provides faces and names for its African characters, whom the movies so often make into faceless victims.

The actors make it new and poignant, and avoid going over the top in the story's limited psychic and physical space.

Will kids like the movie? The kids around me in the theater seemed to, although more for the Muppets than for the cautionary tale of Scrooge.

This is a scary movie that loves other scary movies.